Fascinating essay I picked up via Om Malik’s blog this morning, about where broadcast TV is headed in the year 2006:
[...] the biggest problem for broadcasters is their crumbling core competency and the shrinking value propositions they offer to both viewers and advertisers. The natural ability of the Internet to distribute unbundled media is disrupting broadcasting’s basic business, and that will accelerate in 2006.
I’ve believed for a long time that TV is a dying industry (my foot-in-mouth prediction puts TV’s life expectancy at, oh, 10 years* tops) and I think that our two big networks here in the Philippines will have some rude awakenings in store for them in the next half of this decade.
In my mind, there are two big reasons why TV is on its way out:
1) It sucks to have to wait for a specific hour every week to watch something, and then have to wait again for a rerun if you miss it. TiVo and DVRs are a solution to this, but they are collectively attempting to fill a gap that shouldn’t exist in the first place. The Web allows us to broadcast everything on-demand, why aren’t we using it? Because we can’t monetize it? Web advertising is infinitely more targeted and relevant than anything TV could ever pull off. Because bandwidth is expensive? Push your content through the P2P. Because it takes a long time to download an entire 44-minute episode? The high-end PLDT DSL packages can pull those down in under an hour. Imagine what it’d be like a decade from now.
2) It isn’t called an idiot box for nothing. It can’t interact with you, it can’t predict what you’d like to see next or more of, and it will show you as many commercials as it can get away with without getting penalized. This is stone-age tech, and with platforms like IPTV just waiting in the wings, I’m not jumping the gun when I say that this dog has had its day**.
To be honest, I can’t wait. I want my kids to grow up in a world where they choose which shows to melt their brains with, and then peruse ads plugging contextually-relevant products to poison their bodies with, and then order the whole damn thing online and charge it to my credit card like any reasonable child-of-the-future would do. Anything is better than the crap we have right now. Hell, RSS + Bit-Torrent (or even, god forbid, paying for videos one episode at a time over friggin’ iTunes) is better than the crap we have now.
*10 years in the Philippines. I’d say 5 years for the first-worlders.
** 3 idiomatics in one sentence. New record, kids.